Admission decisions to arrive on April 3

Applicants to Yale will not have to worry about April Fools’ jokes deceiving them with regard to their admissions fate this year.

While many of the nation’s colleges will notify students of their admissions results today, Yale and the rest of the Ivies are waiting until April 3. As thousands of high school students await letters and online announcements, the Ivy League schools are making the final decisions in what was for some of them another record year for applications.

Yale received a total of 15,441 applications this year, up from 14,809 last year. Other Ivy schools’ totals also increased. Dartmouth received 10,160 applications this year, compared with 9,720 last year, Dartmouth Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg said. Harvard’s numbers went up from 19,014 to 19,520, the Harvard Crimson reported. The application totals at Cornell fell this year, following a trend felt at multiple New York universities. Cornell received 21,465 applications compared with 21,519 last year, Cornell Associate Provost Doris Davis said.

The majority of the applications to Yale arrived without any problems, but Bridget Rochester, a senior at Nichols School in Buffalo, N.Y., said Sunday that she had to rush to a last-minute interview for Yale Sunday afternoon. She said the delay was caused by a glitch in the reporting of her SAT scores.

“He’s going to send in [the recommendation] tonight, so they can tell me whether I got in next week,” Rochester said.

Despite efforts to publicize Yale’s online notification Web site through online postings, Rochester said she still wasn’t sure whether Yale had a Web site where it would post admissions decisions.

The online Web site received high marks in the fall from early decision candidates, who said it was welcoming and individually tailored.

“I was really impressed with how personalized it was. It said ‘Congratulations Lisa!’ and then it had a list of people in my area,” said Lisa Kant, a senior at Hopkins School in New Haven who was accepted early.

Alexander Clark ’04, who helped design the notification Web site, said he was putting the finishing touches on a new and improved version of the site this weekend.

“Although we launched prematurely for our early decision candidates, [April 3] is a firm launch date for the regular decision applicants,” Clark wrote in an e-mail.

Candidates will not be able to call the admissions office to ask for their results until five days after the online site is activated and decision letters are sent out on Wednesday, Shaw said.

“There’s a moratorium of a period of days,” Shaw said. “If you were to call me and say, ‘I didn’t get my letter,’ I wouldn’t be able to say anything.”

But because of the online innovation, this year the phones in the admissions office may be quieter than in previous years even after students are allowed to call, Shaw said.

Josh Dezube, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, said he is planning to check his admissions decision online.

But Dezube is not as anxious about the outcome as some seniors are. He has known since December that he was accepted through early action to Harvard.

“I’m not too worked up,” Dezube said. “Because if I don’t get into Yale or [the University of Virginia], Harvard is a very good college.”